My niece’s husband started his career working at a large law firm with very good pay. He felt it was a soul sucking job. He decided to get a degree to qualify him to get a job as a sports director, which involves a lot of contract negotiation. 2 years later he has his “dream job,” but it pays a fraction of his old salary. I just saw him at an all expense paid vacation by my sister (his MIL), and he told me that he is tired being poor and is thinking about going back to big law.
My kids have some friends who are pursuing their dreams and they have parents who are helping with rent/mortgage, medical insurance, car payments, vacations, and some have healthy trust funds.
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I’ve heard of a kid who decided to take a well paying “lower purpose” job for 3 years in order to save money to pay for law school for 3 years, and to enter a poorly paid “higher purpose” law job. This is not something new, and kids have done things like this for the longest time.
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It’s a lot of nonsense, low purpose vs high purpose. There are 4 combinations, low purpose low income, low purpose high income, high purpose low income, high purpose high income.
Not sure we have high purpose high income, at least I can’t think of one, but it’s certainly denigrate the low purpose low income people.
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What is a low purpose job? I personally think every job has value…and it can be high depending on your POV.
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Or it can be negative, depending on your point of view. For example, most people would find the job or profession of thievery to be of negative value, which is why the action of theft is generally illegal. On the not-obviously-illegal side of things, many would find deceptive sales and marketing to be of negative value, since it deceives people into wasting their money (or worse, such as when a prescription drug is more addictive than the sales and marketing material implies it is).
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Assuming the “higher purpose” job is a public defender or a similar position, there are law firms that welcome such folks with open arms after these folks got some experience.
Never thought of thievery as a “profession” or a “job.” 
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Payscale does a survey asking employees if their job has “high meaning”, which seems to be defined as makes the world a better place. Most jobs have lower mid career salary using forum definitions, so there were many “high meaning” lower income jobs including.
Director of Religious Activity/Education – 96% high meaning, $37k
English Teacher – 96% high meaning, $44k
Counselor, Other – 90% high meaning, $34k
Elementary School Teacher-- 90% high meaning, $33k
Low meaning, higher pay jobs were rarer in the table. People in higher salary jobs usually reported both high meaning and high job satisfaction. The best fits in the table were:
Software Engineer – 29% high meaning, $103k
Advertising Manager – 30% high meaning, $73k
Actuary – 30% high meaning, $84k
Tax Examiner/Collector – 38% high meaning, $76k
The “lowest meaning” job in the survey was parking lot attendant with only 5% reporting “high meaning.” Mid-career salary was $20k, so it would fall in the lower meaning + lower income category, which is also a relevant and common group. Most young persons do not have high income jobs, and a large portion of that group do not believe their jobs have a higher purpose. A job can be primarily a way to pay the bills or even to survive, even if it is not high income or high purpose.
I tend to think that if someone is paying you well, and you are not breaking any laws, clearly you are being of some use to someone.
Only if you are not getting paid much do you need to think hard jf you are providing any value to society.
And then there is the motivated brainwashing that you need to set aside.
If charity etc is what you want to do, you should really serve a large number of people in the poorest parts of the world (please lookup effective altruism), not in America.
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Teachers have similar problems (not the same as police) due (at least in part) to public schools not having enough psychologists and social workers.
The number of children who are entering schools today with serious mental health challenges, difficult home lives etc, is astounding. It becomes impossible to teach. This is true in all types of districts, even those with extreme wealth.
Besides the academic expectations (which are difficult enough), teachers are also expected to handle problems that they are clearly not trained for (despite the trainings they are asked to watch).
Thankfully, schools have been able to use Covid funds to hire additional mental health professionals. Their schedules are packed. I don’t know what will happen once these funds are no longer available.
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I think there are lots of higher paying, high meaning jobs. For example, a person who has a strong interest in climate change/environmental issues could go work for a non-profit that spends a lot of money handing out pamphlets but may not accomplish much. OR they can have amazing ideas for products that will have an impact—like be the person who created Tesla and made incredibly appealing electric vehicles that have long range so that people would actually buy them and they’d inspire the other car makers to up their game and make better EVs. I think all the people who work at Tesla and similar companies can feel good that their work is having an impact. It’s not always clear to me that people who work at non-profits automatically have a bigger positive impact on society. Lots of people work in the pharmaceutical industry to create life-saving drugs, just so many examples of ways to work in industries that can have positive impacts. And while there are many,many,many non-profits I admire, I also know of many that I think are fairly useless or at least redundant and incredibly inefficient and wasteful in their use of resources, etc. To me, it’s definitely not black & white with industry=bad and non-profits=good.
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People work for “passion jobs” and are willing to accept lower salaries. Employers know this, and pay them less than they have to. If young people refuse this tradeoff, then employers will be forced to pay up market wage. There is no point being willing to work for a lower wage, and at the same time bemoaning the fact that the wages are low for certain kinds of work.
And separately there is no point demanding that other people show extra respect (by calling some jobs higher purpose or whatever) to them because they made this choice between passion and money. People are free to make this choice. Other people are free to make other equivalent choices. People can respect each other as just human beings and move on.
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I do not believe this to be true. A lot of artists don’t get paid well. They contribute a lot of value to society.
And yes, I see you say you need to “think hard” so this doesn’t apply to everyone with a low paying job.
Please don’t turn this into another low vs high paying job thread.
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It is already a high vs low purpose thread :-), and that’s ok presumably.
It’s not. Start a new thread if the OT conversation needs to continue
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How much one gets paid for a job is determined, first of all, by what others are willing and able to pay for it. Not everyone who values the job is able to pay for it. Secondarily, one generally only gets paid for a share of the value s/he generates. That share is determined, as usual, by supply and demand. If there’re too many people are wiling and able to do a particular job, a greater share is likely to end up in someone else’s pocket.
Not really - one generally gets paid by how replaceable they are perceived to be, their perceived importance, and how skilled they are at using these to negotiate. The higher that a person is ranked on a corporate ladder, the more they get paid, relative to the value that they generate. That is how you get top level executives taking a position, causing loss of revenue, and not only getting paid, but also getting a bonus. They are perceived to be very difficult to be replaced, they are perceived to be highly important, and they use these to negotiate high salaries and bonuses, even when they actually generate negative shares of value.
That is why unions are effective. If workers would get paid based on the share of value they generate, unions would be useless. After all, no company would be able to pay their workers any more and actually survive, so strikes would not work. The fact that companies do raise the salaries of workers after a strike indicates that the workers were getting underpaid, relative to the value that they were generating
The unions simply create a situation in which the company has to deal with how replaceable all of the workers are, rather than how replaceable individual workers are. By reducing how replaceable workers are, unions are able to negotiate higher salaries for these workers.
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I think we should split to a different thread about unions and such.
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That’s what I meant by supply and demand, which is what that perception, rightly or wrongly, is based on.
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Anyone is free to start a new thread to discuss unions if they would like!
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